Wild-card madness
The wild-card race is having a funny effect on some of the main characters. A few topics on the last couple of days of play:
- Pujols and the batting race: Everyone — especially, it seems, broadcaster John Rooney — is getting excited about Albert Pujols’s leading the NL in batting-average, aka "The Batting Title." While the achievement is still a worthy one, it’s probably time — oh, 100 years later — that we began the cultural transition to a better understanding of what it means to be the league’s best hitter. That is, the batting title should go to the league-leader in on-base percentage, not batting average (which isn’t even an average, after all). Cardinal fans needn’t worry that Pujols would lose any accolades; after all, he leads by an even bigger margin in OBP (his .363 is 1.4% better than Larry Jones’s and his .470 OBP is 3.1% better than Jones’s). Not only does OBP better measure what BA purports to — rate of reaching base — but it’s prone to "luck," relying more heavily on BABIP as it does (for what it’s worth, Pujols’s BABIP is .352 on the strength of a 21.6% Line-Drive rate; Jones’s is .375 on 24.2%). It would be Pujols’s first OBP title.
- The frustration of the four-game losing streak is starting to show: Manager Tony La Russa blamed Joel Pineiro for Monday’s lost in Arizona: "The game shouldn’t have been in the sixth inning when we needed to go to (McClellan). Joel needs to get some outs. We had to get through five or six with a crooked-number lead." Well, guess what? Joel didn’t get those outs, so La Russa needs to do his job as manager and pull him. If the Cardinals are still trying to win a playoff spot (did we mention how much we loathe that phrase?), they need to consider each game a do-or-die. Contrast TLR’s blame-shifting to Milwaukee skipper Ned Yost’s "I take no chances with starting pitchers this time of year," and one notices a difference in attitudes: one is a passive victim, the other an assertive champion. Granted, Yost was referring to pulling Ben Sheets to avoid injury, but the idea is the same.
- Sabathia’s pseudo no-hitter: Speaking of Yost and the Brewers, we wish they’d pipe down about the pseudo no-hitter business. While we sympathize with Melvin insofar as way too many plays these days are ruled hits when they are really errors, his argument that the play — in which CC Sabathia mishandled a swinging bunt in the fifth inning of Sunday’s game — should be "overturned" (perhaps he’s channeling Al Gore and John Kerry) fails in two ways. First, trying to benefit the pitcher by getting a hit changed when it was misplayed by the pitcher is pretty shameful. Second, and moreover, the notion that you can retroactively award a no-hitter is preposterous. Besides needing a little to a lot of luck, a pitcher has to deal with nine innings of increasing pressure. Once his no-no ended in that fifth inning, Sabathia no longer had the same kind of tension buildup for the last four innings — it was a totally different game. Sabathia may have indeed finished game allowing nary a hit, but without that "error" in the fifth, it’s purely hypothetical. Rather than basely attempting to bolster Sabathia’s accolades for Cy Young, Yost should happy with the things that Sabathia was able to control — no home runs, three walks and 11 strikeouts — in his superb 76-FIGS outing.